Flick Knife
by PetrichorEyes
Summary: -OneShot- That knife; always there, always on his person; and as vengeful nights drag him away from knowing the difference between what's haunting and what probable, the blade Izaya knows so well breaks the boundries between his horror and reality...


It's the same rooftop that you taunted Rio about suicide on.

Shizuo Heiwajima stands in the dim light, a little distance away from you. His hands are in his pockets, cigarette in his mouth, and although he's facing elsewhere, you know behind those sunglasses he's staring right at you.

"Shizu-chan."

You address him with slight less vibe than usual. This is different than before.

"Izaya-kun."

He puts. But there's no malice, it isn't a growl, he just... says it.

You smile, hands dug into your jacket pockets, and give a little spin round on your right foot. Test him to see if he realised you notice something's slightly off.

As if that was a cue, he starts running at you as you face him again, smile on your face, and you give it a little time before you take several jumping steps towards him.

He draws his fist back whilst he's running, and several things become apparent to you.

There's nothing to throw or attack you with, neither had he brought anything to do so- he never just fought you with fists. And it comes to your realisation that you've never fought alone before, in the quiet, in the dark and away from people. And he hadn't mentioned anything about hating you or questioned how you _dared_ step foot in Ikebukuro.

And as you duck under Shizuo's fist and pivot around to see him skid to a stop side on, this bothers you slightly.

That was _also_ something that was a bit off.

He runs at you again, throwing a kick aimed at your head, which you duck under again, guiding his leg down to off balance him, whilst you swipe the sunglasses off his face and discard them by sending them tumbling into the air to clatter into an inky corner.

Growling slightly at this, the cigarette is spat to the ground and a fist raised again.

Limbs wind and miss each other, a macabre and occasionally brutal dance in the dark, no words are exchanged other than snarls and mocking, light laughter.

Until it becomes uninteresting. You pull out the knife and flick it open, feeling like nothing more than an extension of your arm. Holding it expertly and with ease, you ready it by your side as he runs at you again, fingers curled and eyes dangerous.

There's no weapon to challenge the blade against this time, but as you stealthily leap over his arm to land on your hands and flip back onto your feet, you slice his bowtie clean off, feeling the slight tension against the blade as you send the soft strip of satin fluttering to the ground.

You don't know how he manages it, but he lands a punch on you then. Fist colliding on the edge of your eye socket near your left temple, you stumble back, teeth gritted, head spinning.

In that moment you take a swipe at him to place a neat cut along his right cheek bone, before leaping back, knife defensive and at the ready.

Shizuo turns and pounces on you, and you thrust the knife out, adrenalin higher than usual at wounding him.

It snags through cloth and sinks deep into flesh as he impales himself on it.

He would never let his guard down.

He would never be that clumsy.

He would never be be so easy _just to injure._

Shaking and frozen, he slumps over the blade slightly and all your body knows is shock.

You only yank the blade back out when your senses come to feel warm blood ooze over your hand and mangle stickily in the fur of your sleeve.

Just standing there, you watch him fall down to his knees like a rag doll, gargling slightly. Your whole face agape as he falls onto his hands, a cough dragging through his body.

You see the wound in the left side of his ribcage.

There was no way the impact could have been that strong. It couldn't possibly have managed to go through the gap between his ribs and puncture a lung.

To mark a cut on Shizuo was an achievement of scarce chance. To cause him grievous bodily harm was surreal.

So when he finally falls to the ground and ceases to breath, a dark pool underneath him, the knife still clutched in your hand, still shaken on the spot, gawking down at his body, you don't know what to do; you don't know what to think.

Eyes and head swimming, you break out to run to the edge of the rooftop, a pounding feeling where his fist had hit you.

Without really registering or considering what you're doing, everything a rush of confusion, you mechanically hop over the rails and fall to a crouch at the edge.

There's the stain. Dark and sickening, it draws your stomach down in nausea. Your feet stumbling to the towards the abyss, knife still held in bloodied hand, with no clear reason of justification in your mind,

You jump.

* * *

When Izaya stirred to the same human-infested world as ever, he was always aware that it was the same as every other night had been for a long time. And he always crept in on the morning with more questions than the previous. The same recurring _nightmare_, he gave into deciding, the same horror story of losing his pride, losing his calm, losing his opponent. Clenching sheets in his fists, face rigid and slightly contorted, The Observer was becoming mildly enraged, frustrated, at the realisation that his nonchalance was slowly disintegrating.

There had been a time, before the dreams had become so persistent and harsh, when he awoke simply just to light-heartedly query himself on the idea that he had Shizuo in his mind at night whilst asleep, in bed which complied a little too much with a rumour Izaya had heard of the rather... _interesting_ things a certain nerdy female acquaintance of Kida's was coming out with. Perhaps 'coming out' wasn't the best phrase to use to address that though...

However, the nightmares were now obstinate, and only got gradually more relentless as the days and weeks grew into his longest streak of not visiting Ikebukuro. He refused to think this was because he was scared; not used to being attacked by emotions he only oversaw in humans. It was perhaps because, he had always presumed, that if Shizuo was ever to die by his hand, it would be in the process of killing each other. He had already weighed up that neither of them would be able to sustain a blow that critical on the other without the opposition making them victim of an equal wound.

Every dawn, now, he found himself reaching to his bedside, retrieving the flick-knife from the under side of a drawer where it was concealed, opening it and turning it over in his hands. The absurd impulse was always there; he knew it would be, and although it had never yet pierced flesh, Izaya Orihara found himself running the flat edge of the blade against his tongue, and each time tasting that sharp, earthy, iron-like taste, of blood.


End file.
